Tag-Xplore – Interactive Exploration of Annotation Practices in Digital Editions

Tag-Xplore is an interactive data exploration tool that enables data curators of digital editions to understand the commonalities and differences in annotation practices. The generated insights help increase the interoperability and reusability of research in the Humanities.

Digital Editions (DE) are scholarly document collections that make research artifacts from the Humanities accessible to both humans and machines in a structured manner, enriched with annotations by data curators. However, due to the heterogeneity of the edition landscape, the interoperability and reusability of DE are important challenges to achieve high ORD standards. With Tag-Xplore, we present an interactive and visual exploration tool that enables the effective exploration of annotation practices within and across editions. Multiple coordinated views allow exploration of the search space from various perspectives and at multiple granularities. With Tag-Xplore, data curators can compare their annotation choices with those of other editions, which allows them to follow existing best practices more closely. Additionally, Tag-Xplore can reveal annotation inconsistencies within an edition, supporting data curators in achieving standardized and interoperable annotations across potentially thousands of documents.

Many digital editions in Switzerland already exhibit different degrees of ORD-readiness. However, one overarching challenge for many editions is their existence as isolated research environments with non-standardized and non-interoperable technical solutions. One principle to foster the reuse of ORD collections across repositories is to provide standardization. Ultimately, standardization of digital editions would also allow digital library services to enable user navigation not only within editions but also across editions, allowing different user groups to relate to and contextualize across different editions, thereby enhancing the user experience.

Our goal with Tag-Xplore is to design and develop a tool that allows data curators and other interested stakeholders to explore the annotation practices of their own and related editions. With the insights provided by Tag-Xplore, data curators can make more informed decisions, contributing to more interoperable and reusable research artifacts.

Tag-Xplore offers an interactive visual interface that provides data curators with novel perspectives on the technical interoperability of digital editions. Beyond the scientific impact in both the Visualization and Humanities domains, we demonstrate the practical usefulness of Tag-Xplore. Additionally, we foster knowledge exchange across edition projects through our research methodology and interdisciplinary collaboration with domain experts.

With Tag-Xplore, we contribute a new tool and method to improve interoperability in the Digital Humanities landscape. The novel perspectives on inconsistencies within and across editions reveal concrete opportunities for improvement toward enhanced standardization and interoperability. This positively impacts subsequent steps in the research data lifecycle, including knowledge transfer across projects, easier long-term preservation by library institutions, and reusability by researchers and the public.